Chuck Sweeny: Winnebago County puts safety summit on to-do list

Sunday

Dec 9, 2012 at 12:01 AMDec 9, 2012 at 8:02 AM

Winnebago County Board Chairman Scott Christiansen, elected Nov. 6 without opposition for his third term, is putting together a “public safety summit” in January to develop a coordinated, countywide response to the violent crime surge in Rockford and surroundings.

Winnebago County Board Chairman Scott Christiansen, elected Nov. 6 without opposition for his third term, is putting together a “public safety summit” in January to develop a coordinated, countywide response to the violent crime surge in Rockford and surroundings.

“As I talk to people around the city and county, I find that fear of crime, especially violent crime, has become the top concern, and we must all work together to combat it more effectively,” Christiansen says.

“So we will have a serious dialogue about zero tolerance. We’re going to do what it takes to make sure that when people walk out of their houses, they feel safe.”

Chief 17th Circuit Judge Joseph McGraw, State’s Attorney Joe Bruscato and Sheriff Dick Meyers are among leaders involved in planning the summit, “and we’ve asked Paul Logli to be the facilitator because of his experience as state’s attorney, judge and United Way leader,” Christiansen says.

“We’ll have some speakers discussing proven practices in reducing crime, followed by panel discussions with leaders of police departments throughout the county.”

The date hasn’t been set. I’ll let you know when it is.

Christiansen says nearly all violent crime can be traced to gangs, drugs and guns.

“It seems that every day now we’re reading about another gun-, drug- or gang-related issue. We know from our jail population that 80 percent of our inmates are there on a drug-related charge.”

Worse, he says, Rockford has become a center of drug distribution, where illegal drugs are brought to be parceled out to other cities. “We’ve got a supply chain here. That’s what we need to go after, with more hard-core detective work.”

In any city the size of Rockford, Meyers said, “they’re dealing with gangs, narcotics, and that always brings on guns. We do make a lot of arrests for big quantities of drugs. There’s a lot of activity between here and Chicago. That’s why we concentrate on arresting for possession with attempt to deliver. We work with the Drug Enforcement Administration and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives on major supply chains.”

Resources to tackle violent crime are stretched thin, though, so a key point of the summit will be to better use resources more efficiently, Christiansen says.

“The county is down 20 deputies, the city is probably down 30 officers.”

So, Christiansen and Meyers suggest that the county help to patrol the fringes of Rockford during high-crime periods of the week — north of Riverside Boulevard, south of Harrison Avenue, west of Pierpont Avenue and east of Mulford Road — so city police can concentrate on high-crime areas in the interior.
“At the same time, we’d be asking outlying police agencies to back fill, so we can maintain the level of service throughout the county,” Christiansen says.

I suggest bringing the Rockford Park District and Rock Valley College police into the patrolling mix. Police officers have the same arrest power no matter what their squad cars say.

More coordination among police, though, will require a seamless information flow among Rockford and Winnebago County law enforcement, the sheriff says. While city and county police work together at the street level, there appear to be trust issues up the chain of command.

“For 30 years when we were both in the Public Safety Building, we had access to city police reports. We used to be able get them online, as if the city and county were one agency,” Meyers says.

“Now, we don’t have access to city police reports via computer with the ease we used to have. So if we’re arresting someone at 2 a.m., we don’t have immediate access” to all the information about the person in the city’s data. The easier access everyone has to information, the more productive both agencies are, the sheriff says.

“The city seems to have an issue with allowing us access to that information.”

Meyers’ policy? “Whatever information we have, let’s push it out to the street. I don’t care whose officer it is, if we have it, we can make it available to them.”

I’ll have more on the public safety summit and what it could accomplish in Tuesday’s column.